So you never left the first solar system cuz all the planets looked the same? What, all 3 or 4 planets? 18 Quintillion star systems to visit, but because the planets in 1 solar system looked similiar, you quit. ok then...

So you never left the first solar system cuz all the planets looked the same? What, all 3 or 4 planets? 18 Quintillion star systems to visit, but because the planets in 1 solar system looked similiar, you quit. ok then...

ehh.. I'm sympathetic with Jan here. No doubt his disillusionment was influenced by the abundance of NMS content on youtube, from which reasonable and fair conclusions may be drawn.
Procedural similarity is incontestably there, still, and if that's a big turnoff for you then I'd be cautious about advising another go at it.
Yeah, it's a decently big game in terms of content. Yes, they've recently added a handful of cool new planet- and ship-types. And the story addition/alteration is respectable by most accounts.
But about a hundred hours played (and enjoyed) in the recent update haven't changed my cynical sneer at the thought of that Every Atom Procedural marketing baloney.
That nonsense is grossly hyperbolic. Just compare it against all of the identical assets (I'm sure some critic somewhere has a giant compiled list) that every player will encounter.
For example, every crashed freighter I've searched has been exactly the same in everything but paint colour. The only variety is in the attached lore-bits, and those weren't written by any algorithm.
Here's a judgement and accompanying picture that may be ever so slightly less beaten to death than the usual ones:
The algorithmic robustness found in NMS is simply not enough to be an appropriate compliment to quintillions of star systems.
It is a wee little bit of ehh-pretty-good-I-guess quality jam spread over a flippin' ridiculously oversized slice of toast.

So you never left the first solar system cuz all the planets looked the same? What, all 3 or 4 planets? 18 Quintillion star systems to visit, but because the planets in 1 solar system looked similiar, you quit. ok then...

I went about 3 dozen systems in. All the planets look the god damned same.

So you never left the first solar system cuz all the planets looked the same? What, all 3 or 4 planets? 18 Quintillion star systems to visit, but because the planets in 1 solar system looked similar, you quit. ok then...

I was playing "with" friends at the time. I visited all planets in the local solar system and had the task to search for something or wait for a special event to happen and it didn't happen to me (but for my friends it did as soon as they left their planet) and I searched bases and stuff and it was just like "get resources to improve your ship and weapon and hop to the next star system". I flew around the planets I visited pretty much completely, and every frakking spot on this planet looked the same. Go to a cave at the north pole, at the equator or pretty much everywhere on the planet and it looks the same. And on the other planets, it also looked the same, just with different colours.

So you never left the first solar system cuz all the planets looked the same? What, all 3 or 4 planets? 18 Quintillion star systems to visit, but because the planets in 1 solar system looked similar, you quit. ok then...

I was playing "with" friends at the time. I visited all planets in the local solar system and had the task to search for something or wait for a special event to happen and it didn't happen to me (but for my friends it did as soon as they left their planet) and I searched bases and stuff and it was just like "get resources to improve your ship and weapon and hop to the next star system". I flew around the planets I visited pretty much completely, and every frakking spot on this planet looked the same. Go to a cave at the north pole, at the equator or pretty much everywhere on the planet and it looks the same. And on the other planets, it also looked the same, just with different colours.

Great Summary, Jan.
Unfortunately, that's the nub of the issue I have re-installing NMS on my PC.
I booted it up recently, after hearing about the latest patch, but it's only ok.
If the AI interacted more, i.e. fleet trading etc. then it could happily swallow up some of my free hours .. yeah, a universe-conquering mod would be cool.

Patch 1.37 at long last addressed my mouse & keyboard cockpit look gripe.
Because it's been added! And it sounds like mouse-controlled flight is going to feel a lot better, as it's now properly cursor based and no longer attempting to emulate thumb-stick input.
Also supposedly freighters have been made a little more affordable, so I'ma check that out sometime.

I picked up NMS, and I have to say I'm really digging it. The environments, while not "realistic" are very cool and consistent. The flora and fauna looks cool, and the terrain is wild while not being unbelievable.

I happened early on upon a crashed cargo hauler. Every system was toast. Even though I had no idea what I was doing, I went out and got all the materials to get it up and running so I could ditch that ugly snubnose you start the game with. I got a great sense of accomplishment fixing that ship and flying it off planet.

I'm really enjoying cruising planet to planet and system to system exploring, taking pictures, documenting creatures, etc. I get a great sense of immersion, and it's truly the first game that feels like you can really go anywhere and do anything, that everything exists and is a place I can go. Maybe when Star Citizen releases it will also create this kind of world, but that's a ways off.

I have a few gripes:
- Seems like I'm constantly recharging my equipment, which is just annoying.
- Space is apparently NOT empty, I keep flying into these patches of elongated asteroids that look like moldy pretzel twists.

Got the rover, which makes the game even more fun. Glad they went full Rocket League with the thing: you can drive this thing anywhere and it never takes damage and always lands upright. The fun is prioritized over realism, which is like everything else about this game.

I have been playing this game for a few weeks now, and I must say I feel impressed. I am more than 30 hours in, and I think is quite absorbing. I can't stop playing it. (That's bad, right? Still, is not completely truth so whatever.) It's not perfect, sure, but it feels surprisingly good to me. It's like playing in a toy universe, piloting toy spaceships, driving toy cars on the ground, finding toy animals around, but still good. I have been using the SPACE ADVENTURES mod, tough I recently disabled some of the components (like ALIEN WORLDS to see how the "normal" planets look like and some others). In some ways it looks like a mini-Elite Dangerous of some sort, but it has some issues.

Terrains are too bumpy. (That's not only "unrealistic" but it also makes very difficult to drive around.) There are too many asteroids in space (like Arclite said) which makes flying around at "normal" speed less "fun". (It would be nice to just fly your spaceship through empty space without being constantly worried about crashing against those petty rocks.) It lacks variety. Every world seems to be the same almost everywhere, making exploration less interesting. (I'm not saying that every world looks the same but that any given world looks the same everywhere, like there is not variation inside any particular planet or moon. I may be wrong about this, or it may change close to the center of the universe, but that's how has been so far. Like, I haven't seen planets that are all ocean and one big continent, or a planet that is cold in the poles but hot in the equator, that kind of thing.)

So better than I expected, but it may need some more improvements before becoming a great experience.

"Playing" is not simply a pastime, it is the primordial basis of imagination and creation. - Hideo Kojima